Tony Blair spoke to the media mogul Rupert Murdoch three times in the 10 days before the outbreak of the Iraq war - once on the eve of the US-led invasion - it was disclosed yesterday.

The telephone conversations were among six calls between the two men detailed by the cabinet office in response to a freedom of information request by the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Avebury.

The information was released the day after Mr Blair handed over power to Gordon Brown last month, following a three and a half year battle by the Lib Dem peer. Lord Avebury waited until yesterday to publicise the information.

A Jersey City woman found an AT-4 missile launcher, similar to the one seen here being used by a U.S. Marine, on her front lawn.

Niranjana Besai was leaving her house, located at 88 Nelson Street, to go to work just after 8 this morning when she spotted the launcher on her front lawn. "I read it and it [said] 'missile,'" Besai told CBS 2 HD. "There was little 'missile' [writing] on it."

The US president, George Bush, will undergo what aides described as a routine colonoscopy tomorrow, temporarily leaving vice-president Dick Cheney in charge.

The White House press secretary, Tony Snow, said Mr Bush will have the procedure done at his Camp David retreat in Maryland.

A colonoscopy is a test that allows doctors to look inside the large intestine for possible tumours. Mr Snow said the procedure the president is undergoing will be a follow-up to a test he had in 2002.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a bill to spend debt and back-tax payments to the budget by bankrupt oil company Yukos on 2007 social programs, the Kremlin said Friday.

The funds will go to infrastructure projects and social programs, including road building, maintenance and repair, improving housing conditions, renovation of apartment blocks, nuclear and radiation safety, and research and development programs, the Kremlin press service said.

Key assets of Yukos, once Russia's largest oil company, have been sold off at liquidation auctions to repay billions of dollars in back taxes. The company has virtually repaid its debts to creditors. The Yukos register of creditors' claims included 137 claims from 63 creditors totaling 709.512 billion rubles (about $27 billion). Analysts consider the assets to have been sold at a hefty discount.

ISLAMABAD - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, battling a wave of Islamist violence, suffered another blow Friday when the supreme court gave a victory to his political nemesis, the country's top judge.

Panama wants former military leader Manuel Noriega returned to serve jail time for murder when he is released from a U.S. prison in September, President Martin Torrijos said on Thursday, denying a secret deal to have Noriega extradited to France.

A controversial court ruling has attorneys and groups like the EFF up in arms

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco recently issued a ruling that effectively allows the federal government to monitor a suspect's phone activity and Internet activity without receiving a search warrant. The court's decision allows the use of "pen registers" -- an electronic device able to record all telephone numbers dialed from a landline -- without a warrant.

President Bush signed an executive order Friday prohibiting cruel and inhuman treatment, including humiliation or denigration of religious beliefs, in the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects.

The rough beast that is George W. Bush's Terror War replicates itself with remarkable fidelity. Each new monstrosity it brings forth exhibits the same markings, the same structure: a weak, corrupt client regime maintained in office by the occupation army of a foreign power, in brutal conflict with an ever-growing opposition led by -- but not limited to -- religious sectarians. And each replication produces the same results: chaos, ruin, atrocity, suffering, repression and the spread of violent, virulent extremism.

This has been the pattern in all four of the Terror War's "regime change" operations: the two direct U.S. interventions, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the two proxy wars, in Palestine and Somalia.

On February 7, 2002, I determined for the United States that members of al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces are unlawful enemy combatants who are not entitled to the protections that the Third Geneva Convention provides to prisoners of war. I hereby reaffirm that determination.

Tony Blair was told by the United States yesterday that he had no authority to tackle political negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians as he spent his first full day as special envoy to the Middle East.

Allstate said Thursday that it would stop selling new home insurance policies in California and would continue to seek a 12% rate increase for its 900,000 existing customers.

The state's third-biggest home insurer announced the cutoff Thursday, saying it needs to better manage the risk of potential losses related to wildfires and fires caused by earthquakes that might sweep the Golden State.

In the middle of the biggest glut of condominiums in more than 30 years, Miami developers keep on building.

The oversupply will force prices down as much as 30 percent, the worst decline since the 1970s, and help push Florida's economy into recession as early as October, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at West Chester, Pennsylvania-based Moody's Economy.com, who owns a home in Vero Beach, Florida.

German publishing executive Dieter von Holtzbrinck has resigned as a director of Dow Jones & Co. to protest the board's endorsement of a deal to sell the company, which publishes The Wall Street Journal, to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

In Romania, where temperatures reached 104 degrees Friday, the Health Ministry said at least nine people had died since Monday due to heat.

In Austria, where highs had hovered around 95 degrees for days, the Health Ministry said three deaths Thursday were likely heat-related. Austrian media said at least five people had died from the heat, including an elderly woman who collapsed on a Vienna street Friday.

A 56-year-old woman collapsed and died in Zagreb, Croatia, of what doctors believed was a heat-related heart attack. Temperatures in the Balkan country reached about 104 Friday.

Following a decision of the Rosprirodnadzor environmental protection watchdog, the unique Geyser Valley on Russia's Kamchatka peninsula has been reopened for tourists after a powerful mudslide on June 3.

Tourist paths, destroyed by the mudslide, have been restored, as well as two helicopter landing sites, the head of the department for foreign economic ties and tourism at the regional administration told Tass on Friday.

According to Tamara Tutushkina, the valley has not lost its attractiveness after a natural calamity. Moreover, a lake that has formed in the lower part of the Geysernaya River, has made its landscape even more picturesque.

One of the world's oldest chimps, Fifi, has died in Australia, zoo officials said Friday. Fifi was the matriarch of the 18 chimpanzees at Sydney's Taronga Zoo, and celebrated her 60th birthday in May with sugar-free cupcakes and coconuts among four generations of her family.

A parasite common in Asian bees has spread to Europe and the Americas and is behind the mass disappearance of honeybees in many countries, says a Spanish scientist who has been studying the phenomenon for years.

Research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by SAGE

Virtually everyone who joins a new group is sensitive to the fact that, as a newcomer, he or she must tread carefully for a while, keeping a low profile until becoming sufficiently integrated into the group. When they do offer their ideas, criticisms, and suggestions, existing group members typically resist their contributions. Why does that happen and what can be done to overcome that resistance" Research published in the July issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), from SAGE, explores those questions.

The studies, authored in PSPB by Matthew J. Hornsey, Tim Grice, Jolanda Jetten, Neil Paulsen, and Victor Callan (all at University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia), examined how groups responded to identical criticisms of the group presented by both newcomers and old-timers. In every instance, the newcomers' statements aroused less agreement and more negativity than the same comments delivered by long-term members. As a result, old-timers were more influential in persuading others than the newcomers were.

Ukraine's Health Ministry said Friday 164 people, including 34 children, have been hospitalized since a toxic yellow phosphorus spill in the west of the country Monday, and more patients are expected.

A freight train carrying yellow phosphorus derailed and caught fire in the Lvov Region late Monday. Authorities called the accident the country's worst man-made disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl tragedy, but insisted that no neighboring countries were at risk.

Medics are checking up on local residents, the ministry said, adding that about 800 people have been evacuated from the affected area. The administration in the city of Lvov said 96 residential areas were in a potentially dangerous zone.

Jock Doubleday, director of the California non-profit corporation Natural Woman, Natural Man, Inc., has offered $75,000 to the first medical doctor or pharmaceutical company CEO who publicly drinks a mixture of standard vaccine additives.

The veil over the Bush administration's war on women's reproductive health was pulled back recently by the president's own former surgeon general. When Richard H. Carmora told Congress he was muzzled by the administration when he wanted to speak out on issues of sex and science, he highlighted one of the news media's major failures over the past seven years.

Researchers exploring a remote terrain in Arctic Canada have made discoveries that may rock the world of Canadian geology.

Geologists from the University of Alberta have found that portions of Canada collided a minimum of 500 million years earlier than previously thought. Their research, published in the American journal Geology, is offering new insight into how the different continental fragments of North America assembled billions of years ago.

Lead researcher Michael Schultz, a graduate student at the U of A, took advantage of a rare opportunity to explore the Queen Maud block of Arctic Canada, a large bedrock terrain that is said to occupy a keystone tectonic position in Northern Canada.

Because of its remote location, the Queen Maud block has remained understudied. Until now. "In terms of trying to figure out how Canada formed, this block held a lot of secrets," said Schultz.

A life-size, robotic fly has taken flight at Harvard University. Weighing only 60 milligrams, with a wingspan of three centimeters, the tiny robot's movements are modeled on those of a real fly. While much work remains to be done on the mechanical insect, the researchers say that such small flying machines could one day be used as spies, or for detecting harmful chemicals.

The ancient game of checkers (or draughts) has been pronounced dead. The game was killed by the publication of a mathematical proof showing that draughts always results in a draw when neither player makes a mistake. For computer-game aficionados, the game is now "solved".

Draughts is merely the latest in a steady stream of games to have been solved using computers, following games such as Connect Four, which was solved more than 10 years ago.

The computer proof took Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer-games expert at the University of Alberta in Canada, 18 years to complete and is one of the longest running computations in history.

A man with an unusually tiny brain managed to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, caused by a fluid buildup in his skull, French researchers reported on Thursday.

Scans of the 44-year-old man's brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue.

"He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant," Dr. Lionel Feuillet and colleagues at the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille wrote in a letter to the Lancet medical journal.

The man went to a hospital after he had mild weakness in his left leg. When Feuillet's staff took his medical history, they learned he had had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away hydrocephalus -- water on the brain -- as an infant.

BANGOR, Pa. - A woman was dragging a lounge chair into the shade of a tree when a sudden buzzing told her it was already occupied _ by thousands of bees. "They were swarming like crazy and I ran into the house," Sheila Sabatine said.